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Currently showing blog posts for: November 2014 - . Go BACK to view all posts.

The London Society has proved to be a supportive environment for thinking around our development of the ‘Supurbia’ concept at HTA Design LLP.

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Supurbia is an idea about transforming the contribution to city life of our low density outlying suburbs through the liberalisation of permitted development and associated policies, enabling benefits for residents.

In the early days of the revitalised London Society committee its Chairman, Peter Murray, suggested a suburban bus tour – in November. Thankfully, when it came to it, our journey through East London on a 1964 Routemaster bus took place on one of those unseasonably warm and sunny autumn days.

Uppermost in my mind on the trip was the whole question of the character of suburbia. This question was placed in sharp focus by a comment on our London Society website by a correspondent who had his planning application to fill a gap between suburban semis turned down at appeal on grounds of being ‘out of character’.

So, what is the character of our suburbs? Should we accept that this has been established for ever by the millions of suburban semis that were built between the wars before the green belt put a stop to urban sprawl. We would argue that preservation of neighbourhoods at these low densities is not the way to regenerate those (by no means all) suburban neighbourhoods that are failing.

Perhaps more significantly, the suburbs are an opportunity we cannot afford to ignore in the response to the challenges of increasing housing supply and meeting sustainability targets. In our preliminary study based in Bexleyheath we found a typical block of 1.5 hectares at 27 homes per hectare accommodated just 100 people or so, using more than 300 tonnes of CO2 per year as a consequence of the nature of the stock and suburban lifestyle.

In our view, what draws people to the suburb is the opportunity to enjoy the individual identity in their homes, access from street level direct to front doors, readily and plentifully available private outdoor space, and a choice of transportation means, including, of course, the motor car. And we have attempted to characterise aesthetic preconceptions of suburban homeseekers in a contribution to the first issue of the London Society Journal of our tenure.

Its notable that ‘The London Suburb’ edited by Andrew Saint, entertains a very broad definition of the suburb, including Roehampton and Alexandra Road as exemplars alongside Bedford Park and Hampstead Garden Suburb. So our bus trip took in the new neighbourhoods being developed around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park by the OPLA, Award winning schemes by Sheppard Robson for Bellway at Barking Reach, the astonishing legacy of GLC overspill housing being managed Peabody at Thamesmead and the thorough redevelopment of the Ferrier Estate at Kidbrooke Village by Berkeley Homes

Key conclusions were that high quality transportation infrastructure is critical to the success of new, intensified or revitalised suburbia. Lashings of high quality and well kept public open space makes for a suburban feel and attractive outdoor life even when densities are raised considerably. The high densities and a critical mass of occupation are a minimum requirement to sustain an attractive local service offer. And the semi detached typology is a thing of the past!

If you are a Chelsea-ite you will probably have seen computer-generated images showing Battersea Power Station as part of a new neighbourhood of residential and office towers. They are depicted rising up across the Thames against a pristine sky.

The conventional reaction is shock-horror – look what THEY are doing to our London. But hold on. Nine Elms, now ready for renewal, is going to be a new chunk of London with a new Northern Line station at one end and all the connections of Vauxhall at the other. The towers, including a new US Embassy, will be arranged around a long serpentine park connecting the Tube stations, and a lot of the money that will pay for them is coming from Malaysia. Say that and it earns you what used to be called ‘an old fashioned look’.

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If you try again to defend what is proposed by saying that it will create jobs, you tend to get a snide observation that “they will all be Poles”. Really? Go on to any large building site in London and see for yourself. They are not all Poles, or Romanians; many are Brits, and so are most of the engineers and architects. Make these points and you will be told peevishly that, even if what you say is true, all the flats, far from being occupied by Londoners, will be sold off-plan to Asians or Russians seeking to bank their ill-gotten money in bricks and mortar. What is the evidence for this? ‘Shop-window research’ in a few places such as Knightsbridge, where Richard Rogers and Candy & Candy have built the billionaire-only glass pavilions next to the Hyde Park Hotel.

Look by contrast at the property magazine, Homes & Property, in the Evening Standard, with its hundreds of new developments all over London: does anyone really believe that all are going to foreigners? The features about them are certainly aimed at Londoners.

Let’s protect Chelsea with its terraces. Let’s protect the 18th century squares and streets of Hackney, but let’s also embrace our new London. This city has been changing ever since it surpassed Antwerp and Amsterdam as the financial capital of Europe in the 17th century. It will change again if it succeeds in becoming the main Western location for buying and selling Chinese Renminbi. Other cities would die for London’s dynamism and its ability to attract investment from abroad. What are we afraid of?

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